Saturday, October 10, 2009

"Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration."

While several other blogs have picked at this a bit already, I wanted to chime in with my view of it as a purely 10-man raider:

It blows.

The key problem with this, for me, is that it can (assuming that the wording follows all the other jumping buff mechanisms) jump off of the tank (in about 1 in 50 ticks of rejuv, or about 4-5 reapplications). I need to heal the tank. I keep a rejuv on the tank(s) because:

It adds a health buffer to the tank.

It gives them a small rage/mana/RP bonus from revitalize procs.

It makes them swiftmendable in a pinch.

It buffs nourish.

It's cheaper and quicker to cast than regrowth, without the front-loaded heal at the initial cast of the spell that would just be overheal if I'm casting it purely for the bonuses in 1, 3, and 4.

If it's going to jump off of the tank on a random tick of healing, that's a problem. I have zero interest in collecting 4-pc T10 for my resto kit, if this is to be the set bonus.

On the positive side, if the T10 gearing for 10-man raiders is anything like T9, then not wanting the set bonus does at least leave me more open to picking up offset pieces from heroic modes, which are more easily obtainable than the same item level of tier pieces.

Feral 4-pc:

"Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike."

...holy $&^@. That's awesome. Maybe I will be using my badges to buy offset gear instead of main-kit. My only concern with the feral set bonuses is that they lack the duration-increasing abilities found in the previous tiers, which will in turn reduce the amount of time a cat can spend shredding or FBing as they then need to use more energy/GCDs in keeping their rakes, mangles, SRs, and rips up. I don't think the energy reduction to rip (2-pc bonus) will impact that timing very much, in comparison to the timer increases on the previous sets.

9 comments:

Blizz wording is sometimes confusing. I believe the proc for resto will cause the HoT to jump to a new target, but it doesn't say it jumps off off the original target. One would think it would basically proc a new heal on a new person but finish its duration on the primary target.

One would hope, but given the same wording on other spells, I'm not putting much faith in such a hope until I see the Blizz staff itself announce that to be the case, and (preferably) alter the description on the set bonus to clarify if that is the case.

Set bonuses have traditionally been used as buffs (although the strength of those buffs is debatable), so it would seem incongruous to have the set bonus act like PoM. If anything, that type of behaviour would be more appropriate for a Glyph. It could just be the eternal optimist in me, but my assumption is that the current Rejuv doesn't leave the current target. I'm sure Blizzard will clear it up one way or another this week since it seems like a pretty common question.

"Maybe I will be using my badges to buy offset gear..."I sincerely hope they don't continue with badges for gear and go back to the token system. Badges for gear is so incredibly annoying (not to mention completely inconsiderate to 10-man strict guilds who need to pay badges twice for the same slot unlike 25-man raiders). It made sense for the Coliseum since there were only five bosses and they wanted to slow down the gear accumulation (only other way would have been for tokens to be a random drop from bosses rather than guaranteed), but I'd hope with 12 bosses in Icecrown that they'd go back to the token system that has worked so well in the past two expansions.

Rul, if they go back to tokens, I hope they will be generic token drops for all classes, to emulate the ability for badges to be used for all classes. It can be frustrating to see the same class-set piece drop many times in a row, when no one of that group needs it, and others of another class do.

My greatest hope regarding the 4-pc resto bonus, though, is that they will listen to the outcry of the players and, as a result, make it a sprout/growth of the rejuv rather than a pure jump. I can imagine that trying to make new set bonuses with each tier set is very difficult for them, particularly with how quickly they've been pushing out new tier sets recently (I don't have a single piece of T9 yet, but they're talking t10?), if only for lack of ideas... so I'm not surprised that they would move to make them glyph-like in the changes, when many glyphs themselves already match set bonuses in style (duration increases, spell buffs, etc).

I guess, but the law of averages tends to win out over the long run, especially with guilds with pretty balanced rosters (we have 4 people on each token assuming the class distribution remains the same). It's incredibly unlikely that a token would be completely unusable (as in, no one even needs for off-specs) before everyone else has their first piece.

Also, the first tokens are immediately usable which tends to have a more positive influence on progression. For example, if the last five bosses in the instance drop tokens and we assume that the difficulty of the later bosses is actually high enough to warrant more than one lockout, then guilds will be able to continually gear up as they work on them. This isn't the case with badges since the current gear accumulation rate of Triumph badges is ~3 weeks per piece while still working on the instance (assuming one sticks solely to 10-mans and isn't obsessive about doing the daily heroic).

The token system also properly supports hybrids with properly maintained dual specs -- as it is, since so many badges are needed for main spec pieces, it's virtually impossible to get enough to also build up a set of off-spec gear. For people who regularly provide both roles in raids, it's a tough decision on how to spend them. This is made exponentially more annoying since DPS upgrades tend to provide a lot more overall benefit to the raid than healing upgrades (bosses dying faster makes healing easier), so as someone who switches fairly regularly, I'm trying to figure out if it's worth me pulling my weight a lot more when I'm Elemental or if I should pick up the healing upgrades because it's the "proper" thing to do even though I don't feel I will really benefit as much from them. Tokens don't really have that issue since it's pretty likely that some off-spec pieces will just be accumulated naturally along the way without having to give them much though. Now, obviously, this could be fixed by lowering the token cost of the pieces, but since Blizzard seems insistent on making Emblems of Frost acquirable outside of Icecrown Citadel, that would be unlikely to be the case.

Really, a combination of the two (ala Tier 7) would be ideal. Tokens drop from bosses with badges able to provide at least a two piece bonus if luck isn't on your side.

- Kelthuzad's first drop of the mage/rogue/druid/DK helm was when we were in Ulduar, and we all had already picked up new hats from offset or badges. We've seen 2 total since then. We also had 5-6 raiders who needed it.

- To make up for it, nearly every peice of set gear in Ulduar was mage/rogue/druid/DK, to the point that we were gearing off-off kits (Cel's healing gear) that will rarely see the light of day while everyone else was still waiting for main kit pieces. Statistics said "FU" to us and left the building ;)

I do agree on the point of using a mix of tokens and badges akin to the T7/T8 system, separately (none of this token+badges purchase stuff we see in T9), for purchasing gear, as offspecs are quite important to raid balance these days. There is quite a bit of offset gear that drops and goes to this purpose before getting sharded, though (like my kitty chest)... it just hurts for set bonuses and for those gear-slots that don't drop in 10-mans (for 10-strict guilds like Vortex), which is a problem for mainspec gear as well.